One Work: Tessie Salcido Whitmore

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, 2020, installation, Swish Projects, San Diego.

[Image description: An installation of found objects in a gallery with white walls and a gray floor. An arc of eight short columns stands in the background. Some are variations of Greek and Roman architecture, while others are more modern. There are six different ceramic cats— some life-size and others larger than life-size— sitting on top of the columns. On one column to the right is a t-shirt, on a mannequin bust, with a woman’s nude form printed on it. The male version rests on the floor to the left. On the floor on the right is a white sculpture of a nude woman’s torso. Strings of lights— in the shape of sunflowers, bats, and Yoda wearing a Santa hat— are draped among the objects. Spread on the floor in front of the columns is a crocheted, floral-patterned blanket. On the left side of the blanket is a pile of different snake stuffed animals. A white hand protrudes out of the pile. To the right of the snakes is a white ceramic cat, with “I Voted” stickers stuck to its back. In front of the cat, a fake severed hand rests its fingers on a plastic zodiac game.]

Tessie Salcido Whitmore’s artistic practice is rooted in collecting, a process and an ethos exemplified by her recent installation, We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, at Swish Projects. For Salcido Whitmore, found objects carry an aura and constitute a vocabulary all their own. She has spent hundreds of hours scouring swap meets and thrift stores, not setting out with an agenda but rather allowing psychological room for objects to speak to her. If this sounds a bit hippie-dippy… well, it is, and Salcido Whitmore knows it. Raised by a single mother in California, the artist grew up steeped in New Age religion, an eclectic spiritual amalgam drawing from a wide range of traditions. New Age practices employ a kind of combinatory strategy, one that surfaces not only in its philosophies but also in the do-it-yourself aesthetic of its counterculture. Salcido Whitmore infuses these phenomena with self-awareness, humor, and an artistic rigor that make works like We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature so effective.

The intricate installation is part altar, part still life. While the former is clearly rooted in the milieu of her upbringing, the latter comes from Salcido Whitmore’s extensive academic training as a painter. During her undergraduate education, her professors set up elaborate still lifes in the classroom for students to paint, an approach Salcido Whitmore adopted and continued after graduate school. Soon, however, she realized that she was more interested in the objects themselves, and constructing relationships among them, than in replicating their image on the canvas. As she moved these still lifes directly into the gallery, she cut out the intermediary effort, which allowed her to focus on the process of collecting and the transformation that occurs when she combines objects. 

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature is the most powerful example of this practice in Salcido Whitmore’s career to date. Particular elements in the installation reference art historical moments and tropes: Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture; depictions of Adam, Eve, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden; the use of multiples in movements such as Pop and Minimalism. The seriousness of these references is juxtaposed with a certain goofiness: Yoda in a Santa hat, a creepy fake hand straight from Halloween decor, freakishly large domestic felines. Ultimately, Salcido Whitmore’s practice is ruled by aesthetic choices— while she selects objects she is drawn to organically, her final choices are based on how they operate visually in concert with each other. Undergirded by a formal structure, these unexpected elements mix to summon a vernacular language that feels simultaneously familiar and inexplicable. In We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, Salcido Whitmore blends spirituality, history, nostalgia, and absurdity to create a humble monument to the role objects play in our lives. 

—Elizabeth Rooklidge, Editor, HereIn

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, 2020, installation (detail)

[Image description: Three ceramic cats sit on pedestals. The cat on the left is white with a painted floral decoration, while the one on the right is brown and the cat in the center is yellow and gray.]

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, 2020, installation (detail)

[Image description: A view looking down on a pile of snake stuffed animals on the corner of a crocheted floral blanket. Barely visible under the snakes is the upper half of a white mannequin. At the top of the photograph are the bottoms of three white columns, with a string of Yoda lights hanging down to the floor.]

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, 2020, installation (detail)

[Image description: A fake severed hand with mottled, light skin rests on top of a plastic zodiac game. They sit on a crocheted floral blanket.]

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, 2020, installation (detail)

[Image description: A view looking down on a light in the shape of Yoda wearing a Santa hat, attached to a green wire, resting on top of a white column.]

We Can Discover the Wonders of Nature, 2020, installation (detail)

[Image description: A close-up view of a white ceramic cat, surrounded by the larger installation. The cat has a plaid ribbon around its neck and “I Voted” stickers on its back.]